Sunday, March 30, 2014

Some years ago Philip Yancey wrote a very fine book called Disappointment with God. In the book he
told lots of stories of people who had come into Christianity expecting
wonderful things from a relationship with God, but had ended up being
disappointed. Some had left the faith altogether; others had stayed, but their
faith felt like an empty shell to them.

One of the problems Philip mentioned in the book was the language we use. We often use phrases
like ‘having a personal relationship with God’, but for many of us, what we
experience day to day in our relationship with God feels very different from
other relationships we enjoy. We can’t see God. We can’t hear God. Our prayers
are not very often conversational; they feel more like monologues. And although
we believe that God does things in our lives, those things aren’t very often
completely unambiguous; we interpret them as God’s actions, but others might
interpret them differently.

So what can we
expect from a relationship with God? Let’s take this question to our psalm for
today, probably the best-known psalm in the Bible, Psalm 23.

The Bible tends to address the question of what we can
expect from a relationship with God by the images
it uses for God. The reality of God is far too big for us to take in with our
limited human understanding, so the Bible uses images to help us grasp parts of
that reality. For example, we read that God is like a strong rock, a safe place where we can stand in the storm. God is
like a castle where we can be
protected from the rage of the enemy. God is like a mother hen, gathering her chicks under her wings to protect them
from a fire. God is like the best of
fathers, providing for his children, teaching them and disciplining them in
a just and loving way, and so on.

Psalm 23 uses two images for God. It might surprise you to
hear me say this, because we’ve grown up thinking of this as the shepherd
psalm, but if you look closely at it you’ll see that the shepherd image is not
the only one used in these verses. In verses 1-4, yes, it’s God as the shepherd who provides for his sheep,
leads them in right paths and protects them from danger. But at the end of the
psalm, in verses 5-6, the imagery changes; now God is a gracious and hospitable host, welcoming us to a sumptuous meal in
his house and then inviting us to move in there with him for the rest of our
lives. What do these two images tell us about what we can expect from a
relationship with God?

First, we can expect
God to provide for our needs. The lovely pastoral imagery of verses 2-3
might sound like therapy for the soul to us, but in fact it talks about how the
shepherd provides for the mundane daily needs of the flock.

‘He makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside
still waters. He revives my soul, and guides me along right pathways for his
name’s sake’. (vv.2-3, BAS version).

‘Green pastures’ are places where there’s lots of good
grass for the sheep to eat. ‘Still waters’ are places where it’s easy for the
sheep to drink because the water flows slowly, so there’s no danger of them
being carried away by it. ‘He guides me along right pathways’ means that the
shepherd leads his flock in the right direction, away from danger and toward
safety and good pasture. And when the writer says ‘he revives my soul’ he’s
probably thinking of the word ‘soul’ in its colloquial sense of ‘life’: ‘he
restores my life’ – in other words, ‘he keeps me alive’!

So the writer is inviting us to think about the daily
necessities of life: food to eat, clothes to wear, water to drink, a safe and
warm place to live and so on. God our shepherd provides all these things for us.
He has created the earth in such a way that there are adequate resources for
everyone to live a simple and basic life, if we will use them wisely and share
them justly. He gives us strength to work and families to share with so that we
can enjoy the necessities of life. And because there are people in the world
who don’t yet enjoy those necessities of life, he calls us as followers of
Jesus to live on less than those around us, and to give generously so that
everyone has enough and no one has too much.

You notice that at the moment I’m not talking about what
older writers used to call ‘special providences’ – that is, times when we have
a specific need, and we pray about it, and God comes through for us in an
obvious and dramatic way. I believe in special providences, and I think most of
us Christians experience them from time to time. But I’m trying to help us open
our eyes wide to the totality of God’s provision for us. It’s not just in those
dramatic moments when he responds to an obvious need with an obvious answer;
it’s also in the mundane daily experiences of putting food on the table, saying
grace and really meaning it.

So the first thing Psalm 23 tells us we can expect from a
relationship with God is that God will provide for our needs. The second thing
is that God will lead us in the right
paths. Verse 3 says, ‘He guides me along right pathways for his name’s
sake’. Obviously, when we’re talking about the shepherd, this means guiding his
sheep to the places where they will find the pasture they need, and guiding
them away from dangerous cliffs and other places where they could be in harm’s
way.

What does it mean for us as Christians to say that God will
lead us in the right paths? How does God guide us, and how do we discover God’s
plan for our lives?

It seems to be that in the Bible there are three main ways
of talking about this. First, there’s God’s general plan of life for all his
people, which is given to us in his commandments, and especially in the
teaching and example of Jesus. Secondly, there’s his master plan to heal the
world and bring in his kingdom, which we know is going to come to fulfilment
because he can even take the evil things that people do and bring good out of
them in the end. And thirdly, there are those occasions when he has specific
tasks he wants individuals to do. In the Bible he doesn’t usually have any
difficulty telling them what those things are; he sends them a dream, or a
prophetic word, or someone brings them a message from God.

What’s the most important aspect of this for me as an
ordinary follower of Jesus? Without question, it’s the first one. For me, the
most relevant way that God guides me into right paths is by his wise laws and
commandments which he has given to us in the scriptures and especially in the
life and teaching of Jesus. So I might go to God and say, “God, I really want
to know what you want me to do with my life?” And I suspect the answer might be
something like this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your
soul and all your mind and all your strength, and love your neighbour as
yourself. How’s that to be going along with? Have you got it mastered yet?” And
if I have the chutzpah to say, “No sweat; I got that all down pat last week!”
he might say, “Well, how about this one: love your enemies and pray for those
who hate you!” And I might gulp and say, “OK, sorry I asked!”

All humour aside, do you see where I’m going with this? If
I want to know what God wants me to do with the rest of my life, the most
important answer to that question is that God wants me to learn to follow his
commandments, especially the teaching and example of Jesus. There’s plenty for
me to be going along with there! And if there is more, I need to stop fretting
and trust that God is well able, in his own time and his own way, to make that
plain to me. Meanwhile, I’ll keep busy with the stuff he’s already told me in
the scriptures.

So in a relationship with God, we can expect that God will
provide for our legitimate needs, and guide us in right paths. The third thing
we read about in this psalm is protection
from danger. The psalm alludes to dangers in verse 4:

‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I
shall fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort
me’.

Now there is no doubt that we as Christians do look to God
to protect us in times of danger. Whenever Marci and I are apart and I know
she’s driving around the busy streets of Edmonton, I pray that God will keep
her safe; I know that there are car accidents every day, and sometimes there
are fatalities, and I want God to protect her from that. Also, when we go on
long trips we pray before we leave, asking God to keep us safe on the road.

It’s natural for us to pray like this, and I think God is
happy to hear those prayers. But if you’re like me, and if you think this
through a bit, you might find this a bit troublesome. We’ve all heard of people
who somehow survive a car accident, or avoid getting on an aircraft that
crashes, and they say ‘Someone must have been looking out for me’. But whenever
I hear that, I find myself thinking, ‘What about the poor souls who didn’t survive? Does that mean God wasn’t looking out for them?’ We know
that God does sometimes answer the prayers of his people in a positive way, so
that the sick are healed and the hungry are fed and the hostages are rescued
and so on. But at other times things don’t seem to work out as well; the fatal
disease claims another Christian life, or the Christian in the refugee camp
starves like thousands of others, despite their prayers, or the hostages are
killed by their captors, despite the thousands who were praying for them.

So what is actually promised to us as Christians? What sort
of ultimate protection from danger are we offered?

I think what I can cling to without reservation is the
promise that in the end nothing can take us out of God’s hands, not even death.
In John’s gospel Jesus says,

“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I
give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out
of my hand” (John 10:27-28).

Because we have this promise, we know that we can never
view death in quite the same way. The resurrection of Jesus tells us that even
death, the most powerful enemy of the human race, was not strong enough to
defeat Jesus. No doubt on Thursday and Friday his friends and family were
praying desperately that he would not be killed by the Romans, but their
prayers did not seem to be answered. On Saturday, they may even have thought
that there was no God to answer them;
they felt abandoned, and wondered why they had been let down.

We sometimes feel that way today too; it’s as if it’s still
Good Friday, when the enemies of God have free rein to do as they wish. But the
famous Baptist preacher Tony Campolo once preached a great sermon called, “It’s
Friday, but Sunday’s Coming!” Yes, it is! Jesus has been raised from the dead,
and has promised that one day we too will be raised with him. Then it will be
seen that his promise is secure: nothing, not even death, can pluck us out of
his hand. And so even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
we fear no evil; God’s rod and staff comfort us.

So this psalm tells us that in a relationship with God we
can expect God to provide for our needs, to guide us in right paths, and to keep
our lives in his hands, even in death. The fourth and final thing I see in
these verses is that in a relationship
with God we can expect that there will always be a welcome for us in God’s
presence.Look at verses 5-6:

‘You spread a table before me in the presence of those who
trouble me; you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over.
Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I
will dwell in the house of the Lord forever’.

This psalm is often used at funerals, in conjunction with
the words of Jesus from the gospel of John, ‘in my Father’s house are many
mansions’, which is interpreted as being about going to heaven. So it’s easy
for people to think that when the psalmist talks about ‘dwelling in the house
of the Lord forever’, he’s talking about dying and going to heaven.

Well, he’s probably not. ‘The house of the LORD’ here does
not mean a mansion in the sky where we live with God forever. To the writer of
the psalm, the house of the Lord was the place where God was worshipped in
Jerusalem – later on, the Temple; it was a symbol of God’s presence with his
people here on earth. The writer was saying, “I will live my whole life in the
presence of the Lord, and I will experience his goodness and love forever”.

Look again at those last two verses of the psalm. What’s
the image here? As we’ve said, it’s the image of the gracious host. He has
prepared a sumptuous feast for us, a table full of good things to eat. He has
invited us to his house to share in the feast. When we arrive, following the
hospitality customs of the day, the host anoints our heads with oil as a sign
of welcome. And there’s so much wine to share that it’s as if our cup is
overflowing throughout the whole meal.

But how does it end? It ends with the writer saying, “I
will dwell in the house of the Lord forever”. In other words, the host isn’t
just inviting you for an occasional feast; the host is inviting you to move in
with him and enjoy his hospitality every day of your life.

That’s what God is like. We’re no longer guests at his
table; we’re members of his family. As members of his family, we’re always
welcome in his presence. Whoever we are, wherever we’ve been, we are welcome at
his table, today and every day.

What can we
expect from a relationship with God? This Psalm tells us four things: that he
will provide for our needs, guide us in right paths, keep our lives in his
hands, even in death, and welcome us in his presence our whole life long. I’m
sure you’ll agree that these are wonderful promises. So let’s press on to know
him, so that in our relationship with him we may learn to enjoy these good
things he wants to give us.

The next Lunch Bunch will be April 10th, 11:30 a.m. at St. Margaret's Church. Stan Gerber
will be sharing pictures of their recent trip to Hawaii. Please join us
for a time of fellowship. Everyone is welcome. If you would like to
attend there is a sign up sheet in the front foyer or you can contact Julie
Holmes at 435-4208 or Lesley Schindel at 989-3833.

Sunday, March 23, 2014

A few years ago
I was attending a pastors’ conference at Regent College in Vancouver, and one
of the speakers was Marva Dawn, who is a very provocative writer about many
aspects of Christian life and worship. She told us the story of how a young man
came up to her after the service one day at the Lutheran church she attends. “I
didn’t get anything out of that service!” he complained. “Good!” she replied;
“We weren’t worshipping you!”

As I said, Marva
likes to be provocative! But I actually found that story very refreshing – a
very helpful corrective to modern views of worship that tend to be
entertainment-focussed. And it’s natural that we should think of it in terms of
entertainment. After all, we come here each week and sit in rows of chairs
facing the front. Up front there’s a stage, and on the stage people are dressed
in costumes, speaking ritual words and performing strange actions. What does
that look like, to a normal twenty-first century human? It’s a concert! It’s a
play! It’s entertainment! And so the first question in our mind is naturally
“Was the entertainment good? Was it fun? Was it exciting?”

But if we
understand that we’ve come together to worship God, then that changes everything. Now the most important question
is no longer “Did I get anything out of that service this morning?” Rather,
it’s “Did God get anything out of
that service this morning? Did God enjoy it? Did he like the things we said and
the way we said them? Was he pleased with how well we all participated, and
with the attitude of our hearts?” And that’s where our psalm for this morning,
Psalm 95, is very helpful.

The first thing
we see in this psalm is that true worship is focussed on God. But sadly, it’s often true that our services are
focussed on anything but God.

Sometimes we
focus on the leader – the pastor or
priest or lay reader. Is he interesting? Is she entertaining? Some people won’t
even come to church if there’s not a priest leading the service – one person
told me that he made a point of not coming when I wasn’t here, as if he thought
I’d be pleased to hear that!

Sometimes we
focus on the form of worship. Can we
find the right place in the book or the bulletin? Do we like the music? Is it
the good old hymns, or is it exciting rock and roll? And what about the church
architecture? Do they have chairs or pews?

Sometimes we
focus on our feelings? What am I
getting out of this? Does the service make me feel happy? Is it inspiring and
uplifting and so on?

The biblical
view, however, is that worship is for God.
We come together each week to give to God the best that we can offer of our
praise, our prayer, our singing, and our listening to his Word. Look how this
psalm helps us to focus our worship on God by using four metaphors for him.

First, God is ‘the
rock of our salvation’ (v. 1). The ‘rock’
metaphor, of course, points to God’s strength, God’s reliability, and our
security in him. So this metaphor encourages us to lift our eyes up from our
problems, worries and fears, and to fix our minds on the strength and
reliability of our God.

Second, God is
‘a great king above all gods’ (v.3).
Of course, when this psalm was written the author assumed that there were other
gods, and last week we saw that even today there are other gods that tempt us:
things like money and possessions, success, nationalism, and so on. The writer
is reminding us that the one true God is supreme over all these other pretenders.

Thirdly, God is
the creator of everything that exists.
Verses 4 and 5 say:

In
his hand are the caverns of the earth, and the heights of the hills are his
also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands have molded the dry land.

So we go from
one extreme to the other: from the deepest caverns to the highest mountains,
and from the wetness of the sea to the dryness of the land. And notice how the
word ‘hands’ is repeated at the beginning and end of this section: ‘In his hand are the caverns of the earth…his hands have molded the dry land’. The
writer is reminding us that God’s ‘got the whole world in his hands’, as the
song says.

Fourthly, God is
the shepherd of his people. Verse 7
says,

For
he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.

This of course
reminds us of Psalm 23, that we will be looking at next week: ‘The Lord is my
shepherd, I shall not want’ – and also of the words of Jesus, ‘I am the good
shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’ (John 10:11).

So as we come
together to worship, this psalm encourages us to focus on God – our rock, our
king, our creator, our good shepherd. How are we to respond to him? Verse 2
says ‘Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving’, and verse 6 adds, ‘Come,
let us bow down and bend the knee, and kneel before the Lord our Maker’. This
is the proper response to the greatness of God: to bow before him in praise and
adoration, and thanksgiving for all his blessings to us.

But what’s the
nature of this worship? What impression do we get of it as we read the psalm?
This leads us to the next thing: not only is our worship focussed on God, but
it is also joyful and lively. Look at verses 1-2:

Come,
let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation. Let
us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and raise a loud shout to him
with psalms.

‘A loud shout’!
Doesn’t sound very Anglican, does it? When I was a boy I used to sing in the
church choir, and every Sunday evening we would chant the service of Evensong
using the traditional chants. But when we got to the line, ‘and make thy chosen
people joyful’, the way we chanted it often made a mockery of the words
themselves – it sounded more like a funeral dirge than a prayer for joy!

Of course, we
must add that there is also a place for sadness and lament in Christian
worship, and God is not telling us to pretend that we’re happy if we’re not.
Personally, I’m glad that we use the psalms each week in our worship, because
the psalms help us to be honest about this: many of them, as you might have
noticed, are laments, or prayers in time of trouble. But nonetheless, it
remains true that in general, focussing on God is meant to lead us to joy: ‘Let
us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation’ (v.1).

In this context
we need to think for a minute about the
place of music in our worship. The psalms of course were originally written
in Old Testament times to be sung.
Those of you who are familiar with traditional Anglican chant will know that it
tends to make the psalms sound sombre, but if we pay attention to Jewish music
today, we might suspect that originally the psalms sounded rather different!
Michelle Guinness, a Jewish woman who married an Anglican minister, says that
one of her first reactions to Christian worship was to say, “What on earth have
they done to our psalms? How have they made them sound so miserable?”

So it’s good for
hymns and songs to be lively and full of joy in the Lord. But of course, we
also need to remember that the number one issue is not whether we enjoy a song, but whether God enjoys it - and I suspect that his
enjoyment is most likely tied to the attitude of our hearts as we sing to him.

So our worship
is meant to be full of joy: joyful hearts, and also joyful faces. Somebody once
said, ‘Looking happy in church? That is suspicious behaviour!’ But I contrast
that with my experience as a young Christian when I used to attend a Thursday
evening prayer and study group. Those were wonderful times of experiencing the
presence of God and the power of God, and I used to look forward to them all
week long. I remember my excitement on Thursday mornings, thinking, “Tonight’s
the night!” Why was I joyful?
Because the presence of God in that group was so obvious, and I looked forward
to it every week. And if God is really here, as we say he is, then let’s not be
afraid to express our joy to him.

How do we do
that? How do we express our joy to the Lord? Well, that leads us to the next
thing: our worship is not only focussed on God, and not only joyful and lively,
it also involves both our souls and our
bodies. Look at verse 6:

Come,
let us bow down and bend the knee, and kneel before the Lord our Maker.

Marci and I once
attended a prayer and praise meeting in an Anglican church in Prince Albert,
Saskatchewan. We were singing the song, ‘His banner over me is love’, and the
leader was encouraging us to do the actions. Our bishop, Vicars Short, was
there, and he was doing his best to do the actions, but he did them in a very
restrained and minimalist sort of way, barely lifting his hands over his head
at all! And this from a bishop who wasn’t afraid to lift his hands high when he
was praying the Eucharistic Prayer!

The whole person
should worship God – not just the mind and heart, but the body too. And so, for
instance, it’s right for us to kneel
and bow as a sign of respect for God;
this is perhaps especially appropriate when we confess our sins. I note however
that kneeling as a sign of respect for someone is less common in the world these
days; nowadays we tend to stand to
show our respect, and this was common in Bible times too – standing in the
presence of the King. So in our worship we stand to praise God and give thanks
to him, when we say the Eucharistic prayer, for instance, or when we sing our
hymns. And at times we also sit to
listen carefully to God’s word, or stand for the gospel to show our respect for
the words of Jesus.

Other gestures
are also commonly used in worship. Many people like to make the sign of the cross to remind themselves
that we receive all our blessings from God because of Jesus and his death on
the cross for us. That’s why priests and pastors use the sign of the cross when
they say the blessing at the end of the service. Other people like to raise
their hands when they pray, which was a common way of praying in the Bible. And
then, of course, there are the sacramental acts that almost always include some
bodily action. So we pour water over someone in baptism, and we eat the bread
and drink the wine of Holy Communion. We anoint the sick with oil, and we often
lay hands on people when we pray for them.

So don’t be shy
about using your body in worship! Remember the woman who expressed her love for
Jesus by breaking a jar of perfume, anointing his feet, and drying them with
her hair? I suspect we might have been embarrassed if we had been there, but
Jesus wasn’t embarrassed – he commended her. Her actions reflected the desire
of her heart to show love for Jesus, and we also can use our bodies to show our
love for God in worship.

So we’ve seen
that worship is focussed on God, joyful and lively, and involves the use of
both souls and bodies. Lastly, true worship involves listening to God’s word. Look at verse 7:

Oh,
that today you would hearken to his voice!

In our services
of worship, too, we want to listen carefully for God’s voice. And so each
Sunday we read the set readings from Old Testament, the Psalm, the New
Testament, and the Gospel, and each Sunday we have a sermon as well. I have to
say, also, that the modern obsession with short sermons is just that: modern!
When John Newton wrote ‘Amazing Grace’, most sermons were an hour long! In the
second century Justin Martyr wrote about early Christian worship; remember that
in those days people had to get up before dawn to worship, because Sunday was a
working day like any other. Nevertheless, Justin says this: ‘the writings of
the prophets and the memoirs of the apostles are read, as long as time allows, and then the leader exhorts us to imitate
these good things’.

Why is this biblical
content in our worship important? Because verse 7 reminds us that God is our
shepherd, and the thing about God’s sheep is that they listen to the voice of their shepherd. Jesus said, “My sheep
listen to my voice” (John 10:27). Personally, I think that loving God and
worshipping him involves paying far more attention to what he wants to say to us than to what we want to say to him. That’s why the Bible readings and the sermon
are not an interruption of our worship, but a vital part of it. And of course,
we’re told not to harden our hearts: the message we hear is to be received and
put into practice, which is an act of worship that lasts longer than the
service.

So to recap:
worship is supposed to be focussed on God, as an act of praise and thanksgiving
to him, and of course this is especially true of the Holy Communion service,
which focuses on Christ’s great love in laying down his life on the cross for
us. In worship we’re called to give ourselves unreservedly to God – souls and bodies,
hearts and minds and wills – listening carefully to his Word and quick to obey
the message we hear. This is true biblical worship!

So let’s end by
asking ourselves: Do I need to get my focus off of myself, and onto God? Do I
need to stop asking ‘What did I get
out of that service?’ and start asking ‘What did God get out of it?’ Do I need to be freed up to express joy with my
whole person, speaking enthusiastically, singing joyfully, using soul and body
to worship God with all my heart? And do I need to pay more attention to the
voice of the Good Shepherd in the Bible readings and the sermon, remembering
that Jesus said, “My sheep listen to my
voice” (John 10:27), and that the
psalmist says, ‘Oh that today you would hearken to his voice! Harden not your
hearts’ (7b-8a).

May God help us
all, as we join together every week in offering him the true worship that is
his due. Amen.

Please
start saving your old items for this fundraiser. There will be more information
to come in the near future.

The
Centre for Family Literacy is looking for Adult Tutors at the Whitemud Crossing
Library. There are many newcomers who are in need of tutoring 1-2 hours per
week. Please contact Monica Doherty at 780-421-7323 if you are interested.

We are inviting you and your children to join us for Spaghetti Church
Saturday March 29th, 2014 from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm. We would like to
invite you to participate in this event! We do have a signup sheet policy as
food is prepared for all who will be coming, so please let us know if you plan
to come (including the number of people who will be coming and, if you have not
attended before, the ages of the children), or sign up on the sheet at the back
of the church.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Marci
and I started our married life in a little village in northeastern Saskatchewan
in which almost every member of our congregation was a farmer, or married to a
farmer, or a retired farmer, or connected to farming in some way or other. We
quickly learned what farmers have known all their lives: that the success of
farming is insecure at the best of times. You can spend a lot of money putting
seeds in the ground in the spring, watch it grow nicely all summer long, and
then at the last minute have the whole thing ruined by an early frost, or a
Fall that’s so wet that you just can’t get out on the land to harvest it.

Of
course, that’s where crop insurance comes in. I don’t know many farmers who
would put a crop in without taking out crop insurance; there’s just too much
money at stake if things don’t work out. So if the weather is good and the crop
grows, all well and good; if things go badly, at least the insurance is there
to help you make it through the winter. It’s just common sense.

Farmers
in Bible times didn’t have crop insurance, but there were measures that were
commonly taken in the ancient world that seemed just as much like common sense
to them as crop insurance does to modern farmers. Let me tell you about one of
them.

In
most cultures in the ancient world - including the Canaanites who lived in the
land before the people of Israel - there were many gods you had to pay
attention to. In theory, the Israelites didn’t believe in those other gods;
they believed in Yahweh, the one true God, who made heaven and earth. But in
practice, they were surrounded by nations who had many gods, and they were
always being tempted by them. And if they looked up to the hills, the chances
are that there would be ancient shrines on top of them, places where the old
gods of Canaan had been worshipped for centuries.

Ancient
people thought it was just common sense to pay proper attention to those gods.
If you moved to a new country you needed to find out about the local gods, so
you could keep their laws and offer them the sorts of sacrifices they liked;
then they would bless you and not send you bad luck. If you were a Greek and
you were going for a sea voyage, it made sense to offer a sacrifice to
Poseidon, the god of the sea; if you were setting out on a military expedition
against your enemies, you would offer a sacrifice to Ares, the god of war.

So
if you were a farmer, and you had just finished seeding, it was a good idea to
get the local fertility gods on your side, to make sure they would send you
good weather and make your crop grow. But these fertility gods, even though
they were very powerful, were a little forgetful, and they needed reminding why
you had put your crop in. So what you did was to go to the nearest temple or
shrine and have sex with the temple priestess in the sanctuary; the gods looked
down and saw what you were doing, and it reminded them about fertility and all
that, and so they remembered to bless your land and make your crop grow.

That
sounds both crazy and irrelevant to us modern people; we can’t believe that
anyone would be fooled into thinking it would work, and anyway, we don’t
worship idols any more, so it’s not really relevant to us, is it?

Well,
actually, it is. If an idol is a statue of wood or stone that we pray to, then
no, we don’t have any of those around here. But what if an idol is anything
other than the one true God to which we give our first allegiance and loyalty?
What if it is something to which we sacrifice our health, our family life, our
sense of right and wrong? What if it is something we instinctively turn to for
help in time of need? What if it is something we expect to give us ultimate
happiness? What if it is something we expect to save us from death? Well, then
the list of potential idols, or false gods, gets rather longer.

There
are so many false gods in our modern world. There’s the obvious one, money and
possessions. People think that money can protect you from danger, can make you
healthy, can make you happy, and can give you a sense of meaning in your life. Also,
many people have made huge sacrifices to wealth – perhaps by living somewhere
their family is unhappy in order to get a better-paying job, or by damaging
their health by overwork and unhealthy habits in order to be successful. So
many good things in life get sacrificed on the altar of ‘The Economy’; it’s
almost as if it’s become my sacred duty to consume, so that I can keep the
false gods happy!

Well,
this is only one of the false gods out there competing for our attention; it’s
not hard to think of others. Success is closely connected to wealth and, once
again, many people sacrifice health and family on its altar. Our nation can be
a false god, demanding our unconditional obedience even when its commands
contradict the teaching of Jesus. Instead of turning to God in times of
trouble, people can turn to alcohol or other drugs to deaden the pain and help
them make it through stressful situations. The list goes on: so many good
things that God has made can become idols if we put them in the place of the
one true god in our lives.

Why
am I talking about false gods this morning? Because they appear in our psalm
for today. You might not have noticed them, because they aren’t directly
mentioned, but they are definitely alluded to. Here are the first two verses of
the psalm (121:1-2) in the NRSV translation:

I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will
my help come?

My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and
earth.

It
sounds as if the writer of the psalm is looking up at the beauty of the hills
around him and being reminded of the one who created them, but that’s probably
not the case. What’s probably happening is that he’s looking up at the hills
and seeing, on top of them, temples to those ancient pagan gods. Gods and
goddesses were commonly worshipped on top of hills and mountains, for the
obvious reason that hilltops were closer to the heavens. So the writer is
weighing up his loyalties. “Where does my help come from? Does it come from the
false gods worshipped at the hill shrines? No – they are too feeble to help me.
My help comes from a much stronger source: ‘Yahweh, the LORD, who made heaven
and earth’”.

Well,
that seems like common sense to us, but a moment’s thought will remind us that
the false gods had a couple of advantages in popular imagination. For one
thing, the Lord was invisible and they were not. Pagan generals who invaded
Jerusalem and went into the holy of holies in the temple for a look at the God
of Israel were usually astounded to find that there was nothing in there; they were so used to the idea that a
god needed a visual representation in order to be worthy of worship. And we
have the same problem today. How can you worship the Lord, the creator of
heaven and earth, when you can’t see him and you’ve got no proof that he’s
there? Money is tangible; you can see it mounting up in your bank account, or
feel it jangling in your pocket. Success is obvious for all to see. Popularity,
health, youth – they’re all visible, and tangible. But trusting in an invisible
God? That’s harder to grasp.

For
another thing, the false gods were popular: everyone
worshipped them, so in order to trust in them you really didn’t have to make a
choice; you just went with the flow. And so it is today: everyone assumes that
you will go along with the worship of wealth, or that you will be willing to
set aside your religious convictions if your country asks you to, or that you
will set aside the regular worship of God to make room for Sunday sports or
family activities. Go with the flow, and no effort is required. But if you choose
to worship the one true God and to follow his Son Jesus Christ, you will find
yourself being asked to make difficult choices all the time.

Why
should we do this? The psalm seems to make exactly the same sort of extravagant
promises as the false gods do. Verses 7 and 8 say,

The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will
keep your life.

The LORD will keep your going out and your coming
in from this time on and forevermore.

Other
verses are even more extravagant; verse 6 says,

The sun shall not strike you by day, neither the
moon by night.

There
are some people, of course, who believe these verses, and others like them, in
a very literal sense. They believe that if they follow the one true God he will
protect them from all misfortune and shower them with all blessings in a
material sense. He will keep them from getting sick, and will protect them from
their enemies in times of war; he will bless their businesses and make them
successful and wealthy.

This
works out fine, of course, until misfortune strikes. A marriage breaks up, or a
business fails; a bomb explodes and kills in a random fashion; a routine
medical examination uncovers a life-threatening illness that doesn’t seem to be
responding to treatments. When things just don’t seem to be working out, people
who believe God has promised them health and wealth find their faith in
trouble. Maybe they even find themselves asking, “Is this my fault? Have I done
something especially bad to annoy God, so that he’s punishing me or trying to
get my attention? Or maybe I’ve been praying to empty space all along, and
there really is no God after all?”

I
would like to suggest to you that what the one true God actually promises us is
something less tangible, but far more real and lasting. It’s probably never
been expressed quite so well as in Paul’s letter to the Romans:

Who
will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship or distress, or
persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... No, in all these
things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced
that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor
things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all
creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord (Romans 8:35, 37-39).

‘Nothing
can separate us from the love of God’. At first glance it sounds like such a
wishy-washy promise: ‘You may die of cancer or get killed in an earthquake or
starve in a famine, but nothing will be able to separate you from God’s love’.
It’s easy to scoff at an intangible promise like that and ask what difference
it can possibly make.

Until,
that is, you see it making a difference in someone’s life. I think of my good
friend Joe Walker, who died of cancer a couple of years ago at the age of 47;
he was diagnosed in June and he died in the middle of August. Joe believed in
prayer but he didn’t believe prayer was an unconditional guarantee. What he did
believe was that in some sense, God was in control, and he needed to learn to
trust God and not feel sorry for himself. I remember at Joe’s funeral that his
wife Alisa described how, in the last weeks of his life, he had gradually let
go of all the things that were important to him. He was a great reader and
loved discussing books; he was a guitarist and he loved to play music; he was a
wonderful writer and his blog was a real inspiration to many of us. But
gradually, in the last few weeks of his life, he let go of all those things; in
the end, all he had left was God, and the love of God.

And
so I think again of Paul’s words, ‘Nothing can separate us from the love of God
in Christ Jesus our Lord’. In Joe’s time of need it would have been pointless
to turn to the false gods of money or wealth or popularity or success or any
other false god on offer. Only the one true God could help him, and although
God did not heal him, it was obvious to those around him that God was his rock in
a time of trouble.

So
today, Psalm 121 is giving us some material for reflection and
self-examination. It’s reminding us that the false gods are all around us, and
their voices are very seductive. Am I believing them, trusting in their
extravagant promises, giving them my first loyalty, looking to them for the
ultimate joy and satisfaction that only the one true God can give?

Let’s
have the courage today to look into our hearts to find out just who is sitting
on the throne and calling the shots. And if it’s anything or anyone other than
the one true God, let’s have the courage to dethrone them, and turn again to
the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, the one who, in the truest sense, will
‘keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore’
(Psalm 121:8). Or, to use the words of Jesus, “Seek first the kingdom of God
and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well”
(Matthew 6:33).